The Lewandowsky Census

Anthony has posted up an online census of participants in the Lewandowsky survey. I urge any readers who participated in the Lewandowsky survey to identify themselves as Anthony’s thread using their regular internet handle.

yes, ford this was discussed a long time ago. And people wondered whether Dr. Lew was counting these as “posts” on a skeptic blog. Please see the initial threads
at Lucias wrt to this. The issue at first was two fold.

We now know both to be false. He did not contact 5 skeptics. His associate contacted
3 skeptics, and two other people: SteveMc and Roger P. And we know that not all of them refused him. Some asked questions. But we don’t have 5 mails refusing to post the survey.
None of the 5 contact posted the survey, but failing to post it and writing him to refuse
are two different animals.

In the course of that discussion links were found to a few places on skeptical blogs where the survey was linked. So, nothing new here move along

I echo all of that. Thanks both to Steve and to Anthony for the extra firepower they’ve added to the pioneers like Geoff Chambers and Barry Woods who got the ball rolling after the Guardian’s original article early last month. And if we manage the nail the oil-funded-denialist conspiracrap, with the help of Russell Cook’s history, in the process, wouldn’t that be something?

yes, and that is why Anthony and Steve are trying to get a handle on where the link appeared, who did or didn’t take the survey etc.

TFP, Don’t mislead people into thinking it was posted BY the blog WUWT with its own thread where many would see it… yes it may (or may not) have gotten some response, but it was posted OFF-topic as one of the last comments on a thread that had very few comments, and no one on the thread commented about it or mentioned taking it in response to that link posting. That was not the kind of thread that gets much of the traffic on WUWT from what I’ve seen (only 24 comments, and only 11 unique user comments after the link was posted in the quiet thread) . Since “dbs” mentions having already taken the survey that may only suggest he saw it on one of the other blogs. There is not yet ANY evidence that WUWT was “another [actual] source for responses” although it would be good to know from Lewandowsky et al whether they tracked the Kwiksurvey links and where they were clicked on, in what numbers and in relation to what survey responses, etc.

Oh dear sorry.. fail there with a poor attempt with a novel image post when I came back er, last night 😉

Bottom, line I think Lewandowsky et al basically did a survey in a psychologically pre-disposed way – I say this as a posturing amateur in psychology and await any fun in being corrected in a way I can understand. 😉

I think the fact Lewandowsky can pick out some plots of distribution’s that look like normal probability distributions convinces himself he has something to work with.

I think there are so many issues with the study with priming – and the psychological condition of the setters- that a critic could just go through those alone as a way to focus – a bit like getting Capone with tax evasion 😉

(BTW Sincerely no slight to Lewandowsky meant there in a comparison. In fact I was directing that comparson as a metaphor to passionate lew critics as a suggestion of more useful approach of criticism.)

I was looking at the data and was attempting to post a plot of the distribution of something that did strike me as unusual. The fact both Alien conspiracies look similar when plotted alone but have a striking double peak when plotted together. There may be a reason for this that is straightforward – but it looks like there must be a cause of it that someone could explain?

2. Jerry‘s post on Bishop Hill on 30 Aug 2010 linking to the survey (but not saying he had started or completed it) is currently at that URL, which will work until there are 10 more posts to Unthreaded on BH, when the ?currentPage=648 should be incremented to ?currentPage=649. (Not the greatest technical feature of that excellent blog.) The local anchor #post1219618 should I assume work in perpetuity.

Allcock’s comment was most interesting, especially the part about critical feedback to Charles Hanich and the lack of interest there (of course at that point they were presumably just trying to wrap things up, but still….).

From UWA’s website it seems that Allcock is not simply some random admin but a highly accomplished prof in biomedical sciences (specializing in genome research). i.e., Hanich (whether or not he shared the matter with Lewandowsky) received highly critical feedback about the inadequacy of the survey instrument.

Sure there can be many debates about such matters, but Prof. Allcock does not look like someone who’s critical feedback should have been lightly brushed aside.

There seems to be an over-elaborate approach to this study that invites self-confusion rather than enlightenment. The Title claims something that can be shown as ridiculous almost with the most trivial inspection. This is not to denigrate the people who actually decided to inspect the basis of the title – as I have said elsewhere I am in the demographic who already knew enough of Australian climate politics to discount it and not look further, and I missed this like everyone and their dog two months ago. 😉

Following standard recommendations (Gosling, Vazire, Srivastava, & John, 2004), duplicate responses from any IP number were eliminated (N = 71). An additional 161 responses were eliminated because the respondent’s age was implausible ( 95) or values for the consensus items were outside the 0 – 100 range, or because responses were incomplete. This left 1145 complete records for analysis.

The incomplete records could possibly offer some further information about the subjects. If the CO2 questions preceded the conspiracy questions, it would be interesting to examine what percentage of the incompletes were supposedly from skeptic subjects as well as what the patterns of incompleteness may have been. Such patterns might suggest specific reasons for the lack of answers.

Also, the suppression of other variables which were collected is surprising. The only mention of the word “age” in the entire paper is contained in the quote I have given above. It seems pretty obvious that age could have a fairly strong influence on an individual’s views on the various subjects in the survey. Yet, there is no mention of any analysis whatsoever to determine what that effect, if any, might have been.

Thanks for your answers Roman and tlitb1.
Given the current, albeit low number, responses on the WUWT thread for responders who overwhelmingly claim not to have finished the survey I find the number of results (60 or less?) disregarded for incompleteness surprisingly small.